Educator smoothed integration of schools

William Dandy commanded such respect as a school principal and administrator that even an interim school superintendent, county commissioner and university president called him mister.

That said a lot for Mr. Dandy, the former principal of Everglades Junior High and Dillard High and the first black deputy superintendent of Broward County schools.

Mr. Dandy, who recently underwent brain surgery and had suffered a stroke, died Tuesday. He was 79.

He will be remembered for helping the county integrate its schools and keeping the racial strife that engulfed the county from creeping into classrooms. But friends also remembered him for his generosity and as a good husband and mentor.

"I saw the humanity in this man, the humanness, the kindness, the love for mankind," former interim Superintendent Dorothy Orr said Tuesday, as she helped plan funeral services from Mr. Dandy's couch. Orr said he consoled her in 1992, when her oldest son was in the hospital, terminally ill with diabetes.

"As I talked to him about my son, he just cried," she said of her former boss. "Tears just came down his eyes. He had a heart and there it was."

Mr. Dandy helped lead the school system through one of its most difficult adjustments.

Seventeen years after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that declared separate schools for blacks and whites "inherently unequal," Broward bowed to federal pressure to desegregate its schools.

As principal of Everglades Junior High, Mr. Dandy smoothed the school's tumultuous transition from all black to racially mixed. Mr. Dandy was named principal of Dillard High in 1973, and again kept the racial strife at bay.

"He was if not the most, one of the most, revered public school educators in South Florida," said Niara Sudarkasa, a Fort Lauderdale native and former president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. "He shepherded all of Broward County into the era of desegregation."

White and black students were bused to schools miles from home. The county closed some black schools. Their students scattered to integrate faraway white schools. The school district tried to close Dillard, but community uproar saved it. Still, tensions remained as its black teachers and administrators were transferred to desegregate other schools.

Mr. Dandy required students to sit in alphabetical order so they wouldn't segregate themselves. He had teachers select racially balanced teams for gym class and other competitions.

The first time students used a racial slur, administrators discussed it with them. The second time, there was discipline.

Mr. Dandy did not permit teachers to describe students by race. Every student had a name.

"I don't think you realize how [we] were changing the whole lifestyle of people for hundreds of years, for generations, the fears, the myths," Mr. Dandy told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2004. "This was probably the first time some of these whites had ever dealt with an educated black who was a college graduate."

A native of St. Petersburg, Mr. Dandy went to Florida A&M; University and graduated in 1949. His future wife, Carolyn, attended Fisk University in Tennessee. They met in 1959 at Dillard, where he was a guidance counselor and she was a teacher. They married a year later.

Mr. Dandy received a master's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as Dillard's principal for two years before being promoted to area superintendent and ultimately deputy superintendent -- second in command of Broward schools.

The junior high school he led into integration became his namesake, William Dandy Middle School, when he retired in 1993. Some parents tried to have his name removed from the marquee after police charged him in a hit-and-run accident that killed a woman in 1994. He later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a fatal accident and received five years' probation.

"He had a great deal of remorse," said Dorsey Miller, a former school administrator and close friend for 35 years. "We didn't talk a whole lot about it, but he said he wished it never happened."

In the last decade, Mr. Dandy shied away from the public eye. His home, where he once frequently entertained friends and held strategy sessions, became a quiet meeting place for his inner circle.

The house in northwest Fort Lauderdale was William and Carolyn Dandy's first house -- their only house together. There, the couple started a life that lasted more than 46 years. They had no children. Now, it is where Carolyn will live alone.

"He was always helping people," she said hours after her husband's death Tuesday, as she received well-wishers' phone calls and visits. "He was a people person."

Each inch of the couple's home seems to tell his story.

Tribal masks dot the walls. Hand-carved African furniture held family friends as they helped Carolyn plan the funeral. Orchids grow outside. And inside is an endless sea of plaques and accolades for a life dedicated to educating Broward's children.

"No certificate was too small to be proud of," said Karen Moreland, a close family friend.